court plaster might have been, took my seat in the stern sheets of his
boat. It was no slight inward struggle to part from the steamer that to
most of the passengers was the only visible connecting link between
us and the dry and habitable earth, but we pulled away and entered the
city, stemming a rapid current as we shot the levee.

We glided up the long level of K Street--once a cheerful, busy
thoroughfare, now distressing in its silent desolation. The turbid water
which seemed to meet the horizon edge before us flowed at right angles
in sluggish rivers through the streets. Nature had revenged herself on
the local taste by disarraying the regular rectangles by huddling houses
on street corners, where they presented abrupt gables to the current, or
by capsizing them in compact ruin. Crafts of all kinds were gliding in
and out of low-arched doorways. The water was over the top of the
fences surrounding well-kept gardens, in the first stories of hotels
and private dwellings, trailing its slime on velvet carpets as well as
roughly boarded floors. And a silence quite as suggestive as the
visible desolation was in the voiceless streets that no longer echoed
to carriage wheel or footfall. The low ripple of water, the occasional
splash of oars, or the warning cry of boatmen were the few signs of life
and habitation.

With such scenes before my eyes and such sounds in my ears, as I lie
lazily in the boat, is mingled the song of my gondolier who sings to
the music of his oars. It is not quite as romantic as his brother of
the Lido might improvise, but my Yankee "Giuseppe" has the advantage of
earnestness and energy, and gives a graphic description of the terrors
of the past week and of noble deeds of self-sacrifice and devotion,
occasionally pointing out a balcony from which some California Bianca
or Laura had been snatched, half-clothed and famished. Giuseppe is